One of the biggest challenges facing the six-county region is whether conventional development will continue unabated, generating the crowding, traffic and smog characteristic of Los Angeles.

The main local alternative is "smart growth" as advocated in the Blueprint Program created by the Sacramento Area Council of Governments in 2004. The council's planners will spend 2005 seeing if local city and county governments and builders will go for the idea.

Smart growth is not exciting, but it might be the biggest local economic cultural trend to emerge in the new year.

Smart growth calls for using less open land, building more homes per acre, building on empty or underused sites in existing neighborhoods instead of rural land, and building homes, shops and offices on transit lines so that people drive less.

In December SACOG's board, made up of elected officials from throughout the area, adopted the Blueprint Program's smart-growth scenario as its regional strategy. It's a radical change for an area that has mostly sprawled without hesitation.

The new year will show if the region's municipalities and building industry will support the plan or not. Although SACOG's planners and environmentalists say the blueprint's approach is crucial to preserving a healthy, relatively uncrowded quality of life, inertia and momentum favor business as usual unless there are dramatic reasons for change.

But there might be at least one such reason -- land close to local urban areas got scarcer and more expensive in 2004. That's prompting many homebuilders to heed SACOG's call for thriftier use of land as 2005 begins.

Top 3 Events

Homebuilders tilt toward denser lots

1. Homebuilders, facing soaring land costs and a shortage of ready locations, shift away from building the large-lot houses formerly typical of the area. They start opting for smaller lots or sites farther from downtown Sacramento or South Placer.

2. GenCorp Inc. of Rancho Cordova continues to prepare huge chunks of its 13,000 acres in eastern Sacramento County for development. The company submits applications to build on more than 3,000 acres, bringing the tally of its land in processing to nearly 6,000 acres. Speculators and homebuilders begin circling like hawks.

3. The Sacramento Area Council of Governments, working with Valley Vision, approves the Blueprint Project to help guide growth through 2050. SACOG confers with civic leaders of six local counties in hopes they'll adopt the plan's "smart growth" ideas.